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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29114643">Lost in the Fission</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintersheir/pseuds/wintersheir'>wintersheir</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Chernobyl (TV 2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>AU Where They Live Longer, Fanfic can be a dialogue if you want, Feedback Always Welcome, I'm always trying to write smut, Kissing, Love Confessions, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Mentions of Suicide, Period-Typical Homophobia, Real IB World History Hours, So I'll leave this as 'Incomplete' and maybe I'll circle back around to it, Suicidal Thoughts, Touch-Starved, concrit always welcome, shows up in the fandom 2 years late with Starbucks</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:26:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,764</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29114643</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintersheir/pseuds/wintersheir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Valery Legasov awoke on the third anniversary of the disaster at Chernobyl to the sound of rain.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Valery Legasov/Boris Shcherbina</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Lost in the Fission</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is a <i>fictional</i> work based on the <i>fictional</i> versions of public historical figures from a television series.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>April 26<sup>th</sup>, 1989</p><p>
  <em>I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her “What do you want?” she answered, “I want to die.”</em>
</p><p>Valery Legasov awoke on the third anniversary of the disaster at Chernobyl to the sound of rain.</p><p>He lay abed until the cat demanded better of him, purring and nosing his face, and got up as slowly as an old man to face the gray light.</p><p>Hot shower, hot tea, shapeless gray-green cardigan to try to keep out the chill he felt constantly. Books and papers. The cat, eating his plate of offal, and retiring to the settee to bathe.</p><p>Valery had lived here for around a year and a half, in this run-down Moscow apartment for other poor and meaningless citizens of the regime, tucked into a poor and unfashionable part of the city, a low priority for infrastructure or services. It had been a mercy of sorts, after his performance at the trial. Instead of being shot, he’d been promised irrelevance. He’d been given leave to grab a few belongings and his cat, and then he was whisked away to a series of less and less prestigious flats until his much-abused other possessions caught up with him.</p><p><em>Write,</em> they’d told him, <em>you are no-one, but you are still expected to deliver results. </em>He had submitted his reports, made his recommendations, written his papers—in as bold terms as he dared, and then bolder, perhaps even more damning than he had been at the trial—and received no replies, or requests for clarification, or any kind of acknowledgement whatsoever. It was like slipping food through a slot for a prisoner in solitary confinement in reverse. No contact. He did not exist.</p><p>Valery had considered ending his life.</p><p>The radiation had taken its toll on him, weakening heart, lung, liver, eyesight. He was tired all the time, and if he had any hair left at all, it was because of those last few follicles had been seized by patriotic fervor, refusing to break the siege.</p><p>In another life, he might have had family to fall back on—family that he’d have damned by his unpatriotic behavior, to be sure, but family nonetheless—but he had none; he had his cat and his books and his record player and his tape recorder, and neighbors who ignored him, and professionals who treated him with cool indifference.</p><p>He had made recordings of his reports and memoirs, dictated them in Russian and German, sought the opportunity to disseminate them to sympathetic or at least subversive ears. No responses.</p><p>There would be no changes. Nothing would change about the culture; nothing would change about the procedures; and nothing would change about those damn reactors and those damn graphite tips.</p><p>He had raised the rope and the chair and everything.</p><p>But some sound had distracted him, some voice calling in the street; and by then the moment of despair and utter anguish and terrible resolve had passed, and he was suddenly too tired. He’d left the rope up for a few days and then put it away.</p><p>He was going to die. He’d toyed with the idea of his death having some use, making some statement. He’d meant to. He hadn’t. Cowardice.</p><p>He had gone back to waiting to die, rather than take it into his own hands.</p><p>A second anniversary of the explosion had passed; a year of his exile in plain sight. The third anniversary was today, and two years of exile in a few months.</p><p>It rained all day. In the evening, there was a knock at the door, stirring Valery from immersion in a pyrometallurgical paper, but he ignored it. It didn’t go away; more knocking, nearly hammering.</p><p>Valery’s heart beat a touch faster, and he wondered if he should keep ignoring it. It was wholly unlikely to be pleasant, whoever it was. Maybe he should make them break in, if they wanted him that badly.</p><p>(No, if it was the KGB, there would be few niceties, not even knocking. No need to be afraid. What was there to lose?)</p><p>He rose, knees popping, to see who it was. Something to divert him, briefly. A neighbor who didn’t yet know who he was, or who was too drunk to care.</p><p>The door, opening; and a beatific vision beyond: angels, trumpets, gold and silver like an old forbidden icon of a saint.</p><p>Boris Shcherbina stood at the door, shaking an umbrella.</p><p>“Boris!” Valery breathed, in delight and wonder and consternation and fear.</p><p>“Valery Alekseyevich,” Boris replied, the polite, comradely greeting belied by the crow’s feet crinkling beside his eyes. He didn’t move for a moment, staring at Valery as if he was a piece of fine art or delicate machinery, studying him, drinking in the sight of him, and then spread his arms to embrace him.</p><p>Valery breathed deep, letting Boris’s arms enfold him, smelling smoke and soap and some scent from lotion or cologne, and it was all he could do not to collapse, weeping. God have mercy, <em>Boris</em>.</p><p>If the hug was insufficiently masculine, a little too long with only gentle patting on bony backs, there was no one around to see it.</p><p>“Well? Are you going to invite me in?” Boris asked, releasing Valery. “Don’t get tired of my face before I even get in!”</p><p>“There is no chance of that,” Valery said quietly. He leaned on the doorframe, doing his own study of Boris Shcherbina, somehow before him. He had lost weight; his suit and overcoat hung slacker on his frame, and his silver hair had turned white. Still quieter: “Boris, how can you be here? They—”</p><p>“None of that matters now, Valery,” Shcherbina rumbled. “You don’t think a career party man can’t pull a few strings?” he added, a touch more jovially. “There are bigger problems. You are forgotten.”</p><p>“This flat is almost certainly bugged,” Valery said, barely audible.</p><p>Boris laughed softly, bitter, rueful. “No one is checking,” he answered. “No one cares about some scientist who brought some amount of embarrassment to the state a couple of years ago. It is all coming down, Valera,” he added quietly, fondly.</p><p>Valery’s heart thudded at the diminutive. He had stopped looking for his tails, his watchers and spies—it had never occurred to him that they might have stopped coming.</p><p>“So I’m here,” Boris was saying. “You’re here. Let’s drink for those who are not, eh?” He stooped to the ground for a bag that clinked.</p><p>“Of course, Boris. Come in.”</p><p>Valery led him through the narrow foyer, head spinning. The last time he’d seen Boris was—the day of the trial, seeing him and Ulana from the back of the Volga as it sped away. <em>You will have no friends</em>, Charkov had promised him. So it was.</p><p>And then Boris Shcherbina had walked back into his gray-green life, large as life. Almost.</p><p>“Boris, aren’t you supposed to be dead?” Valery asked as he fetched plates and glasses.</p><p>Boris had brought a feast, vodka and bites to have with it: sausage, black bread, pickles, onions, caviar.</p><p>“A benefit of <em>perestroika</em>—cancer treatments from the West. Lung cancer. From smoking, not Chernobyl. They cut me open, hacked out the tumors, and treated the rest—drugs, all kinds of things. Radiation, if you can believe the irony.”</p><p>It wasn’t that funny, but the two of them laughed until they were near-weeping, laughter that bordered on hysteria. They needed to have had far more vodka than just these first sips to justify this kind of behavior—and still more for the kind of behavior that Valery Legasov, near-invalid, radiation survivor, was thinking of, seeing Boris Shcherbina again.</p><p>A psychologist had advised him to marry, once, to treat his illness, his pathological desire for male lovers. It had its roots in the father, or the mother, or early childhood, or adolescence, or all of them. Redirecting the impulse into proper relationships with women was the best way to manage it.</p><p>He’d never managed it, preferring his work at the institute, and discreet meetings when the desire came to him. There had always been some lurking postdoc or bright-eyed student around, especially if he found his way to the arts department. He’d thought himself too old for that sort of hasty assignation for much of the eighties, preferring to deal with the impulse alone, before he met Boris Shcherbina.</p><p>It hadn’t been a good time—<em>fucking </em>Christ<em>, it hadn’t been a good time</em>—back then, in Chernobyl, every day a new, desperate crisis with death and permanent injury dogging them at every turn. But Valery had liked what he’d seen. Even from the beginning, he had to admit, when Boris had been a swaggering fool, uncomprehending of the terrible danger he was in, that the nation was in.</p><p>There had been more than one shared hotel room or trailer where he could snatch little intimacies, like watching Boris undress, or emerge from the bathroom freshly-showered. Valery could save those moments like a beggar’s coins in a deep, empty pocket, and pretend that he wasn’t bone-tired, unsure if his nausea was too much tea or vodka on an empty stomach or gamma rays streaking through him like swords; pretend that he was a bold man instead of a coward; and pretend that backing Boris Shcherbina up against one of those ugly hotel walls to kiss him until he was weak at the knees and gasping was anything but an invitation to have Valery put away for criminal acts.</p><p>It had been a coping mechanism, he’d thought later. Terrible danger all around them, and he had been tasked with an investigation that had and would send men and women to early graves, that those in power didn't believe was even necessary. His brain had invented this little distraction, this little fantasy, this impossible desire. And so that was all it was—just an amusing world for him to retreat to, when it all became too much. It had been too much, very frequently.</p><p>But here they were, the two of them, even after cold recrimination from the state for all he tried to do. Boris had sought him out, after all.</p><p>Well. Well.</p><p>“Radiation!” Boris was saying, wiping his eyes. “It bought me a few more years, they say. And I asked myself what I’d like best to do with that time. So.”</p><p>
  <em>What he’d like best, oh God…</em>
</p><p>Valery covered up the burst of longing with sarcasm. “You could have gone to a Party dacha with a half-dozen ballerinas, but instead you came to visit some old invalid? You are too kind, Boris, but I beg you to reconsider,” Valery said, smile twisted to one side.</p><p>Boris laughed. “Too late, and not to my taste, anyhow. It’s a duty of my position. Charity visits, photographs with the people, that sort of thing,” he said, clinking glasses with Valery.</p><p>“Ulana?”</p><p>“She’s fine. Well, even.” Boris eyed him, appraising. “She has been circulating a pamphlet on the results of our investigation. Translating it into languages of the republics. The graphite tips will still be there, the lack of safety mechanisms, but perhaps more will know what not to do. It's not true safety, I know that! I can hear your voice ringing in my ears, Valery, about safety, and human factors, and mechanical solutions, but it's something.”</p><p>Valery’s heart swelled, fit to burst, hearing of Ulana’s efforts—the tension in his body seemed to relax all at once, leaving it hard to stand, and he collapsed into a chair gratefully, Boris joining him. Ulana! Of course Ulana was on it. She would achieve what he could not, butting his head up against the vast, uncaring institutions of science, while she passed through the cracks, passed through brick walls like they were water.</p><p>“That's wonderful, Boris. That's wonderful. You are both in danger, and you know that, of course.” He sighed, lighting a cigarette, something to steady him on this roller-coaster. “I thought, perhaps egotistically, that I could shield you. Go down like a martyr, shot full of arrows or roasted slowly. You are defying more than just the Soviet obsession with appearance, you know—it was a tad personal, I sensed. Charkov said that no one would know, no one would act, and all of my achievements would be assigned to someone in better standing, someone more cooperative. But the two of you…” Valery realized he was weeping, and he took off his glasses to paw the treacherous moisture from his eyes. “Thank you, Boris, and Ulana,” he rasped. “Make sure she knows how grateful I am. Make sure <em>you</em> know.”</p><p>Boris put a broad hand on Valery’s shrunken shoulder, hidden under the cardigan, and shook it gently. “Not all hope is lost, you see,” he said, ragged.</p><p>Valery was perhaps imagining that Boris’s own eyes were swimming, but the two of them swigged vodka in a hurry, finishing their glasses and glugging more from the bottle. It was fine stuff, properly distilled instead of the worker’s rotgut, crawling with impurities. He had run the cheap kind on a chromatography column, once, in graduate school, and gave up trying to assign all the little peaks, all the little poisons. He’d stuck to inorganic chemistry: clean, straightforward, fewer disgusting sulfur compounds.</p><p>Maybe he had chosen wrong. They wouldn’t have called an <em>organic</em> chemist to Chernobyl.</p><p>An organic chemist wouldn’t have met Boris Shcherbina.</p><p>“And fuck Charkov,” Boris was saying. “Charkov is gone, retired. Kryuchkov replaced him, and Kryuchkov doesn’t give a fuck about you—he was head of the PGU, he only sees foreign enemies. Paranoia and nuclear nightmares ate his brain.” Boris sighed, tapping out one of his own cigarettes, history passing behind his eyes. “No, Kryuchkov may kill us all, but not you in <em>particular</em>. There are changes coming,” he said, the words heavy with meaning, hours of meetings, significant looks, things said and unsaid in the wolf’s den of the Politburo. “Ulana will be all right.”</p><p>Valery’s skin prickled. “All right after what? What’s coming, Boris?”</p><p>Boris smirked, bitter, rueful. “<em>This</em> they might take exception to me talking about. I’ve already said too much—but fuck it. It’s all coming apart, Valery. We spent too much, chasing the Americans—in Afghanistan—in Iran—and then, Chernobyl. Chernobyl cracked the façade.</p><p>“The Union is failing, Valery. That is why they don’t care about you any more, though they could blame you without much effort. It’s too big to be scapegoated away. They are all scrambling to be on top—or at least not crushed in the death throes—when it all comes down at last.</p><p>“I used to believe in this, Valery,” Boris said heavily. “But it was rotten inside, and if we are lucky it will merely fall to pieces instead of exploding.” <em>Exploding and raining down death, poisoning the water and earth. Raining down chunks of graphite.</em></p><p>Boris looked so distraught at his own words, as bad as the time that Valery had told him they’d both be dead in five years (<em>two to go)</em>, that Valery embraced him again.</p><p>Boris felt—well, not that Valery had really known what his body was like, other than the snatched glances in hotel rooms or the horrid, freezing decontamination showers they’d been subjected to now and then.</p><p>He barely remembered the occasions or the reasons, just the shrieking Geiger counters and hazmat-suited soldiers stripping their contaminated garments, his flabby academic’s body exposed in front of all those young men, and in front of Boris, who was not so aged in body for all that he was seventeen years Valery’s senior, and then blasted with frigid water until his cock and balls had fairly been sucked up into his body.</p><p>But he’d had the impression—fantasy, perhaps—that Boris had been well-kept, muscular, even, in a way that would be called ‘stout’ in a shorter man. In the hug, Valery could feel the jutting bones, the thinness of his skin, like an old cat.</p><p>God, he never wanted to let go of him.</p><p>But too soon, Boris was shifting his weight and releasing him.</p><p>Boris gulped vodka, setting the glass down with a thud.  “Here I am!” he said roughly. “Here I am, complaining of the state’s troubles to someone it has victimized.”</p><p>Valery smiled at him sadly. “No, Boris. Tell me everything. I have nothing to report, nothing new, unless you want to hear neighborhood gossip I’ve overheard, since I am of course not permitted friendships.”</p><p>“Fuck Charkov, that vile little weasel,” Boris growled. He squeezed Valery’s hand on the table; Valery did his best not to let the simple joy shine out of his face, like a child. “Enough of that bullshit. I will talk to you if I want, bring you <em>home</em> if I want—”</p><p>Valery’s stomach was full of butterflies at this pronouncement, but Boris seemed to suppress his fervor, releasing his hand and sitting back and puffing away furiously.</p><p>“I’ll kill him,” Boris muttered. “I’ll kill him for isolating you like this. You look like a ghost.”</p><p>He felt like one, although Boris didn’t look much better, being completely honest, stripping the rosy glow of memory and longing. And yet the sight of him, the sound of his gravelly, two-pack-a-day voice, was sweeter than any smuggled-over Western music.</p><p>“Is it really as bad as all that?” Valery asked, smiling. “Cruel of you, to speak ill of the dead.”</p><p>“You are not dead <em>yet</em>, Valera,” Boris told him. “And neither am I.” He sighed again, was silent, listening to the rain pattering on the windows.</p><p>“I did so well managing Chernobyl that they gave me the next disaster,” Boris Scherbina said, staring at something Valery could not see and did not want to imagine. “The earthquake in Armenia.”</p><p>Valery longed to hold Boris, not these chaste, fraternal hugs, but to kiss his throat and listen to his heartbeat and to try, somehow, with his ruined body, to shield him from the shadow that had risen on his face as memory cut him sharper than glass, more savagely than radiation.</p><p>“We spent billions of rubles in Chernobyl, traded hundreds of lives to prevent tens of thousands of deaths. All our planning, desperate, calculated, crisis after crisis, horror after horror. The earth just… opened up, Valery, in Armenia. We spent all that time worrying about the sins of mankind, atomic horrors and steam explosions and death rain, and then the earth turned on us anyway. For our sins, perhaps. Its aim was fucking atrocious.” Boris took a long, long drag on his cigarette. “Two thousand kilometers further north, it should have gone,” he muttered.</p><p>“Fifty thousand dead, Valery. The buildings all collapsed like sand castles. The hospitals fell and killed their doctors. They hauled people out from under huge slabs of brick and concrete, people somehow still alive, and then they died when the pressure was released. Families survived the quake and then died in the cold.</p><p>“We died in Chernobyl, you and I. We gave our lives. And my reward was to see all the deaths we’d prevented at Chernobyl happen for the same reason—stupid, preventable, caused by incompetence and bad materials and grift. Yours was to be forgotten in this hovel. Christ—I’m sorry, Valery. This wasn’t what I meant to do, to show up on your doorstep and recite an old man’s regrets. I wanted to—”</p><p>
  <em>You wanted to what?</em>
</p><p>Boris gulped more vodka. “I’m not drunk enough for this,” he said under his breath, nearly inaudible.</p><p>“I will listen to whatever you have to say, Borya,” Valery said softly. “You found me again. And the hell you’re an old man.”</p><p>Boris’s eyes crinkled at the familiarity. “I’m nearly seventy, Valera. I earned it. I look like a Siberian mummy out of the permafrost. A skeleton, hung up at the back of the classroom.” The cat jumped up into his lap, and he offered a fist for him to nuzzle at, rubbing both cheeks and accepting Boris’s strokes along his tabby back before jumping down again to weave among their legs and the chairs’.</p><p>Boris sighed, pouring again for them both.</p><p>“I’m glad you weren’t here <em>all </em>alone. What have you been doing to fill the time?”</p><p>“Pretending I am still a scientist,” Valery rasped, cigarette in one hand, leaning down to pet the cat with the other. “I still receive requests for peer review, which I perform, and hear nothing. I write letters to the scientific journals that are never published. Possibly this is for the best, as I cannot get into professional tiffs and politics, which as you know I have no head for.”</p><p>“Good God, I would be keen to see you fight it out with the other eggheads, if you can slam your fists on the table in front of fucking Gorbachev.”</p><p>“The smaller the stakes, the fiercer the fighting,” Valery answered. “Vicious, vicious battles over this or that detail, men at each others’ throats over minutiae while their graduate students are off doing actual science. I was not made for war, Borya, but for cowardice.”</p><p>“This man faces down the Central Committee over some trivial detail like a shiny, black rock in a report, and he says he is a coward!” Boris said expansively, as if for the benefit of an invisible audience. “Valera, my, my friend, how dare you undersell yourself. You are courageous.”</p><p>“Foolhardy, more like,” Valery told him, smiling.</p><p>Boris waved a hand, dismissing. “Listen, there is a fine line, I won’t deny it.”</p><p>“The truth is that I was terrified—more terrified of the consequences of the explosion than the consequences of disrupting the meeting. Fear, not bravery, drove me, has driven me.”</p><p>Boris was silent a moment, selecting and lighting another cigarette.</p><p>“You acted, though, in spite of fear,” Boris said gently. He took a long drag, exhaling and letting the smoke drift, waft through the room in lazy patterns. “There’s a lot of sitting and waiting in the hospital, you know. I’ve been thinking, remembering things I haven’t thought of for decades. The war with the Finns. We were so scared in those days. Death could come at any moment; from a sniper, or from the cold, or from one of your own comrades. No one talked about it, but it could happen.</p><p>“I was still a boy. An infant! An utter innocent, crouched in the snow in Arctic darkness. I saw men with black fingers and toes, men frozen solid, bullets exploding men’s brains to rain down on the snow. Terrible things, evil things. But that part of my life was over! I was in control; I had found my way; knew what to say and what not to say. Party man. Then I met you, Valery, a reckless man, an unknown, acting like a fool in front of the Central Committee. Fucking hell, Valera, you idiot.” Boris reached over and kissed his temple, smelling of smoke and alcohol, and it made Valery positively drunk.</p><p>“And it only got worse. You stopped me from killing us both over the reactor—fuck, when we saw later what had happened to the firefighters, the men in the control room, that poor bastard who got too close on the dumping run—I had no idea. I could not comprehend it, the bullets shooting us, invisibly. When I realized what I’d almost done—” He was silent a while, his breath up, contemplating the lights outside, smoke spiraling lazily from the cigarette in his hand.</p><p>
  <em>Touch it. Touch his hand. Reach for him. Do something, damn you.</em>
</p><p>“I was afraid again, as afraid as that boy in the snow. When you told me we’d be dead in five years… it stabbed me in the heart.”</p><p>“I’m sorry, Borya,” Valery whispered, his own graveyard rasp sounding as unsubstantial as mist.</p><p>“No, Valera. You acted. You told me the truth. It is time for truth, painful truth, frightening truth, foolish truth, instead of safe, comforting lies.” Boris’s eyes slid over to his face, glittering in the low light. “Valery. I came here to act, to be brave, like you. I came here to—I—I need to…” A pause, inhale, exhale, smoke heaving out. “This… may shock you. Undo our friendship. I apologize, but I am too old for silence.”</p><p>Valery Legasov's heart was hammering in his ears. Was he—was Boris—</p><p>Well. Well. Was it time? Was it wishful thinking?</p><p>What would a man like Boris Yevdokimovich Shcherbina want with him?</p><p>Still. Regardless. Valery had something to say, too. He wanted him to know. Wanted to say it aloud.</p><p>
  <em>You couldn’t kill yourself, coward. Are you going to fail here, too?</em>
</p><p>No. Valery, too, was too old. Fifty-two and feeling a hundred. What was there to lose?</p><p>Valery abandoned his cigarette in the ashtray and shifted close to Boris at the rickety table on his rickety chair, far closer than was polite. “No time left for silence,” Valery agreed, his voice a whisper in Boris’s ear.</p><p>And Boris did not lean away; Boris did not curse him and get up; Boris Shcherbina put an arm around Valery’s shoulders, stabbing away his own cigarette. There was a look of unbearable fondness in Boris’s eyes, the faintest of trembles in his hand.</p><p>Oh God, to grant him this mercy, this grace.</p><p>Valery slipped dangerous hands onto Boris’s waist. Four years’ hard labor was still the price of this, if the wrong person saw. No plausible fraternity to hide in. It felt so good to touch him.</p><p>“Be careful, Deputy Chairman,” Valery said. “My heart has… not been the same, since the radiation.” He hoped the playfulness came through.</p><p>It had. “Neither has mine,” Boris rumbled, and he put a hand under Valery’s chin, tilting it upward a fraction to kiss him.</p><p>Boris’s lips were dry and papery and tasted like a pub foyer, and Valery’s were no better, but he could have stayed this way forever, he in Boris’s arms and Boris in his, a confession and a lover’s kiss and all it implied.</p><p>“…So. So. Our friendship is not over, I gather,” Boris said, getting his breath back.</p><p>“I’ve wanted to do that for a <em>long</em> time.”</p><p>“You should try it again to confirm. That’s the scientific method, isn’t it?”</p><p>The second kiss was even better, the two of them finding some hunger. Valery was on the edge of the chair, and so was Boris, as their bodies strained for one another.</p><p>“Valera, do you, do you have a couch or something, I—”</p><p>“Not the bed?” Valery teased him, kissing his throat. “I grant it’s narrow—”</p><p>“I, I don’t even want that yet, I just—I just want to touch you—”</p><p>Valery’s heart hurt at the longing and gentleness in Boris’s voice, like Valery was a cat he was trying not to scare away. Boris would do anything he asked, he knew at once. “Years of touches we’ve missed out on,” Valery agreed, pressing his forehead to Boris’s. “Do you think we can catch up in an evening? I’d like to try.”</p><p>They weaved over to the settee like a couple of drunks, kissing messily while giggling and taking a couple of tries to make it across the room. Boris didn’t push Valery down onto it like he was expecting, but instead stilled and hugged him again. Valery subsided, too, and leaned into him, head tucked into Boris’s neck, arms wrapped around him, their chests and bellies pressed together, and Valery’s heart pounding and his skin thrumming at the contact.</p><p>“I’ve wanted to hold you for three years, very nearly, Valera,” Boris rumbled, “and now that I have, I don’t want to stop. I died, a little, when Charkov stole you from us.”</p><p>“I can’t imagine what you see in me,” Valery replied, enjoying the reverberations of Boris’s voice through their bodies. “There are a hundred mousy scientists my age, thousands of mousy, bespectacled grad students and younger men, better-looking examples of the type. And you pick an old, ruined one who’s in shit with the KGB. No accounting for taste, Borya.”</p><p>Boris chuckled. “Don’t sell yourself short.” He brushed some wisp of hair (such as it was) off Valery’s forehead, tucking it under the single-digit number of strands left up top. “None of those men could be as brave as you, as hard-working, as precious to me. Valery, I want to stay much, much longer than an evening.”</p><p>Valery kissed him again, gentle. “You had better.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I would normally think of myself as a Gen writer, but to survive 2021 I'm hyperfixating on Television Shows Containing M/M Subtext and Jared Harris, so, hi there. I did a deep dive of the entire Valoris tag on AO3 and Tumblr, so if you see something reminiscent of another work in the text, it is intended to be flattering. Hope you enjoyed.</p><p>Notes:</p><p>- No name for the cat as I didn't see a fanon name I liked, and I had a pet cat who Refused To Be Named too. Sometimes they are too powerful. I will consider suggestions though!<br/>- Typical of me to go straight from zero to a hundred, Babyfandom Gen to borderline-RPF (and also all-too-typical that I went "cock... er spaniel I can't do this". I have some fragments where somebody does actually touch somebody else's eggplant emoji but it is a challenge)<br/>- MY HIGH SCHOOL WORLD HISTORY KNOWLEDGE LET ME SHOW YOU IT<br/>- AU where they live and are still grumpily commenting on world politics in 2021 like Gorbachev<br/>- They live, dammit, and they are having a great time</p></blockquote></div></div>
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